The New Pictures

Rosemary (Roxy Films; Films-Around-the-World), the work of two talented men of West Germany's "left-out Left," almost (but not quite) comes off as the Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera) of the fat '50s. Director Rolf Thiele and Scenarist Erich Kuby have lifted their plot from some recent accounts in Germany's tabloids of the gay life and ghastly death of Rosie Nitribitt, a high-class floozy of Frankfurt who opened her door to dozens of West German millionaires but couldn't keep her mouth shut, and so one night was strangled with a pair of her own nylons (TIME, Sept. 29, 1958). The movie takes the sordid case as an occasion for social satire, as a chance to say, often in a deftly indirect and wickedly amusing way, that the "economic miracle" is a moral disaster.

As the film starts to roll, nine shiny black Mercedes limousines roll into sight in sober single file. Whose funeral? Germany's? They roll up to an elegant hotel. Nine doors fly open, and out step nine millionaires in nine black Homburg hats. After a long day in the board room, the directors of the Insulating Materials Cartel--a cover name for a munitions trust--hurry off in sober single file to spend a long night in the bedroom.

One of the directors picks up a shabby little streetwalker named Rosemary (Nadja Tiller). ''My first big break!" she sighs happily, and so it turns out. Soon she is set up as a grosse cocotte with a fancy flat and a flashy white Mercedes of her own. Then she takes on a sideline: selling information about the German munitions makers to their French competitors. Then she takes on another: blackmail. One night nine shiny black Mercedes limousines roll up to the door of her apartment house. A scream is heard. The nine limousines roll out of sight in sober single file.

Kuby and Thiele have chosen, with a shrewd eye for the ironic contrast, to present their moral horror story as a bubbly champagne farce. For at least two-thirds of the film, the thick-necked Schlotbarone bounce about hilariously, like a chorus line of caricature capitalists. In fact, the weakness of the picture as social satire is that too often it tickles where it ought to jab. Only in the last reel does the customer stop giggling, as in the bottom of the champagne glass he suddenly sees something hard to swallow. The moviemakers make him swallow it anyway. Oddly enough, Germans have not shrunk from the experience. Rosemary is the second most popular picture made in Germany since the war.

Our Man in Havana (Kingsmead; Columbia), Carol Reed's screen version of Graham Greene's bestselling thriller, starts out like a conventional Alec Guinness comedy, a wonderfully silly spoof of a spy thriller. But before long, the attentive spectator will understand that Greene, Reed, Guinness & Co. are tickling his ribs with the well-sharpened stiletto of political satire, and he may not entirely relish the sensation.

Guinness plays an Englishman in Havana, several years Before Castro, a seedy-respectable chap who runs a vacuum-cleaner shop and wonders how he'll ever get the money to keep his pretty daughter (Jo Morrow) in that fancy finishing school. Then along comes a British Secret Service spymaster (Noel Coward) who offers him $150 a month and expenses ("tax free, old man") to set up a Caribbean intelligence network. Guinness bustles off to the country club to recruit some spies. The first fellow he sidles up to turns out to be the British ambassador. The next one rushes away from what he imagines to be an indecent proposal.

Baffled, Guinness decides to invent his agents and fake his reports. For a while, all goes well. The home office (Ralph Richardson) is delighted, particularly with the sketches of a mysterious military installation Guinness claims to have discovered in "the snow-covered mountains of Cuba," and the Prime Minister himself remarks with amazement that the drawings "remind him of a gigantic vacuum cleaner." Guinness gets bonuses, starts to live it up at the local emporiums of pleasure.

All at once something goes terribly wrong. Two men whose names he has used on his roster of imaginary agents are attacked by persons unknown. A businessman is beaten up; an airplane pilot is murdered. Guinness himself is blackmailed by a Cuban policeman (Ernie Kovacs), betrayed by his best friend (Burl Ives), almost poisoned at a European Traders' luncheon. The gigantic vacuum cleaner is switched off at last, but not before it has sucked the poor bumbling booby who designed it into a vortex of evil that is no less personal than political.

The mixture of mayhem and heehaw is particularly tricky to handle, and not even the sure hand of Director (The Third Man, The Key) Reed has always achieved a smooth blend. But Funnyman Guinness is, as usual, marvelously funny, especially when he pretends to be cunning: at such moments he looks like a slightly depraved marshmallow. Funnyman Kovacs, a sort of Clark Gable with fangs, makes a perfect comedy menace, as smooth and slippery as a fresh-licked Havana cigar. But aging (60) Funnyman Coward, who was stealing scenes when the other two were still stealing cookies, almost walks off with the show. The barroom scene in which he solicits Guinness for illegal purposes ("You go in the Gents and I'll follow you") is a comic masterpiece, and few actors alive could match his reading of the show's silliest line (Richardson: "Ah, Hawthorne. Good flight?" Coward: "Bit bumpy over the Azores, sir"). Indeed, the show is a bit too funny for its own good. The satire is too often sacrificed for the sake of a laugh, and many customers may never get the grimly ironic moral of the tale: in the modern world, political innocence is social guilt.

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